Not Quite A Jellyfish Day

My friend Linda sent me an email the other day about some guy’s unfortunate encounter with a jellyfish (which I suspect was made up). I deleted it, but basically it was a letter from a brother to a sister, and he was trying to console her for something lousy she’d been going through. The guy wrote about his day at work. He worked underwater, and to make a long and rambling story short, it ended with a jellyfish being sucked into one of his intake tubes and landing…well, in an unfortunate place.

While my day yesterday was not quite like having a jellyfish in my butt, I’d put it up there close.

I’d been having this weird new back pain for days. (On top of the usual pain.) It was bilateral, just above the belt line, hurt when I stood up and sat down, hurt when I got in and out of my car, and when I was sitting still or lying down, didn’t hurt at all.

I took it to the PT on Tuesday, he snapped a couple of things, stretched me around a bit, and when I got up onto his treadmill, it had started to feel better.

Until the next afternoon, when it came back stronger. Now it was only on the right side, but all the way up and down my spine and into my sacroiliac joint. It was not the usual post-manipulation soreness. This was bad.

As he’d told me I could call Thursday if it wasn’t better, I called. He was busy, so I talked to Linda, his assistant (the same Linda of jellyfish fame, above). While Tom didn’t have any appointment slots, Linda said he’d squeeze me in if I showed up that afternoon.

Then she told me that was having her own almost-jellyfish day – her car was in the shop and the only ride she could get dropped her at work at 7:30 AM. She hadn’t brought her breakfast. And she also couldn’t get out for lunch. I asked her if I could bring her anything and she said she’d LOVE a cup of coffee, since Tom’s wife had taken their coffee maker home to clean, since it wasn’t working right. No problem, I told her, and remembered the coffee bar on my way to the clinic.

I not only bought her a cup but an extra for Tom, since he was being so nice to get me in without an appointment. I puzzled about how I was going to handle getting two cups of coffee in and out of my car, since I need both hands to get into the driver’s seat.

Somehow I got them in, using one of those handy cardboard drink holder thingies. Then, when I was installed into the driver’s seat, I moved them into the drink holder.

No problem on the drive over, except a few drops of spillage. No problem with the bumps in the road and the hills and the sharp turn in the clinic’s driveway.

Then I pulled into the parking lot. I debated putting the cups back into the holder, putting the filled holder back on the passenger’s seat, then leaning over to pick them up once I was out of the car. I wondered if this would hurt my back even more, so I went for my usual beverage removal system – when I open my door, put the cup (or water bottle, if the case may be) on top of the car, then retrieve it when I get out.

I lifted the first cup out. Put it on top of the car, fumbling around with the positioning so the car antennae wouldn’t knock it over. I put it down and thought I had a safe landing but – and these things always happen in slow motion – it started to fall, cascading me with hot coffee (with cream and sugar). Fortunately, by then it was no long so hot. And But it was just as wet. And fortunately, very little of it landed in the car. Most of it soaked my left leg (I was wearing heavy knit pants (black, fortunately) and long underwear underneath.) and the two sweatshirts I was wearing. I remember not yelling out something unladylike but in my mind just mentally shrugging my shoulders, like these kinds of things happen to me every time (which they don’t). I also remember the coffee going from lukewarm to chilled very quickly.

At least I like the smell of coffee.

Amazingly, about a quarter of what was left of Linda’s java was sitting upright, in its cup, on the ground. I salvaged that, plus the other cup (which I got out of the car by sticking it back into the beverage holder and picking it up from the passenger’s side (no pain, of course).

Then went inside to report the bad news to Linda.

Her face registered shock, and asked if I was all right.

“Just wet,” I said. “Here’s what’s left of your coffee.”

“Just as well,” she said. “I just needed a little buzz anyway.”

After she took me into the locker room and blow-dried the worst of the saturation away, I went back into the clinic. Did whatever exercise I could before the pain was too bad to try anymore. Meanwhile Tom kept saying he’d get right to me in a little while, just be patient.

I didn’t see him for two and a half hours.

The good news was that by the time he worked on me, the coffee was dry.

The bad news was that the one little snap he got out of my back did very little and I still had the worst of the sacroiliac pain.

But I guess it beats having a jellyfish on your butt.